6 ms·

In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock

In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-triples-the-odds-that-a-victim-receives-justice/ https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...

asveikau 4mo ago
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
- Manuel_D 4mo ago
  Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business. The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
  - asveikau 4mo ago
    What if what if what if? That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false. Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
    - cogman10 4mo ago
      In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment. We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
    - Manuel_D 4mo ago
      Historically low American crime rates are still several times higher than most of the developed world.
      - asveikau 4mo ago
        Look how much you've moved the goalposts. First Seattle. Then it's: what about small towns? Now we suddenly have an additional requirement of matching stats from a different country. Narrower and narrower the scope gets, before you admit that you're thinking about this the wrong way.
        Manuel_D 4mo ago
        When did I ever mention small towns?
  - chmod775 4mo ago
    What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
    - Manuel_D 4mo ago
      The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place. Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
      - etchalon 4mo ago
        You understand why that's worse, right?
        Manuel_D 4mo ago
        No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
        etchalon 4mo ago
        You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale. And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere." Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
        Manuel_D 4mo ago
  - LocalH 4mo ago
    That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network. You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
    - ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
      They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product. They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse. An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
  - etchalon 4mo ago
    In America, yes. Obviously in other places, no.
  - Ancapistani 4mo ago
    While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock. As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
    - Manuel_D 4mo ago
      Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock? Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
      - GrinningFool 4mo ago
        "Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
      - pesus 4mo ago
        > People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
        deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Ancapistani 4mo ago
        The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation. Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years. > People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person. This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
- ACCount37 4mo ago
  This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention. What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though? There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
  - eclipticplane 4mo ago
    Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
    - seibelj 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - zhivota 4mo ago
      Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
    - derektank 4mo ago
      That entirely varies by locality. My parents just had their vehicle broken into and their credit and debit cards stolen (in addition to some cash) and the local police department visited the grocery store where the thief used the cards to buy gift cards multiple times to collect security footage to try and track them down (the grocery store store’s security lead was out the first time on vacation). If your local police department won’t do this and you want them to, ask your community to raise taxes to hire more and/or better cops.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process. Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- glaslong 4mo ago
  This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras. The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted. Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
Avshalom 4mo ago
That's not what that says though. >technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53% "technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise. Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him. Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance? ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth. ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
- lazyasciiart 4mo ago
  Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.
  - picofarad 4mo ago
    Is that considered exigent or like well we just noticed it anyway because I know that there's case law that says like if the cops barged into your house and you have drugs on the table they can arrest you even if they didn't have a warrant to enter your house.
lazyasciiart 4mo ago
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
Computer0 4mo ago
Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.

asveikau 4mo ago

Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.

Manuel_D 4mo ago
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business. The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
- asveikau 4mo ago
  What if what if what if? That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false. Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
  - cogman10 4mo ago
    In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment. We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
  - Manuel_D 4mo ago
    Historically low American crime rates are still several times higher than most of the developed world.
    - asveikau 4mo ago
      Look how much you've moved the goalposts. First Seattle. Then it's: what about small towns? Now we suddenly have an additional requirement of matching stats from a different country. Narrower and narrower the scope gets, before you admit that you're thinking about this the wrong way.
      - Manuel_D 4mo ago
        When did I ever mention small towns?
- chmod775 4mo ago
  What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
  - Manuel_D 4mo ago
    The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place. Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
    - etchalon 4mo ago
      You understand why that's worse, right?
      - Manuel_D 4mo ago
        No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
        etchalon 4mo ago
        You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale. And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere." Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
        Manuel_D 4mo ago
- LocalH 4mo ago
  That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network. You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
  - ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
    They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product. They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse. An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
- etchalon 4mo ago
  In America, yes. Obviously in other places, no.
- Ancapistani 4mo ago
  While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock. As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
  - Manuel_D 4mo ago
    Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock? Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
    - GrinningFool 4mo ago
      "Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
    - pesus 4mo ago
      > People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Ancapistani 4mo ago
      The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation. Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years. > People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person. This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
ACCount37 4mo ago
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention. What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though? There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
- eclipticplane 4mo ago
  Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
  - seibelj 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - zhivota 4mo ago
    Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
  - derektank 4mo ago
    That entirely varies by locality. My parents just had their vehicle broken into and their credit and debit cards stolen (in addition to some cash) and the local police department visited the grocery store where the thief used the cards to buy gift cards multiple times to collect security footage to try and track them down (the grocery store store’s security lead was out the first time on vacation). If your local police department won’t do this and you want them to, ask your community to raise taxes to hire more and/or better cops.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process. Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
glaslong 4mo ago
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras. The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted. Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.

Avshalom 4mo ago

That's not what that says though. >technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53% "technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise. Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him. Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance? ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth. ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.

lazyasciiart 4mo ago
Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.
- picofarad 4mo ago
  Is that considered exigent or like well we just noticed it anyway because I know that there's case law that says like if the cops barged into your house and you have drugs on the table they can arrest you even if they didn't have a warrant to enter your house.

lazyasciiart 4mo ago

The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.

Computer0 4mo ago

Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.